I am preparing an article that estimates the performance of Kaveri next APU.
According to different sources, AMD official claims, rumours... I finally believe that the CPU on the A10 desktop Kaveri APU will be about a 25% faster than trinity A10-5800k. I know that this is approximate and that some benchmarks will show more performance whereas others will show much less, but provides an idea of performance.
I am using linux benchmarks from the review of the A10-5800k and adding a 25% performance. For instance, in the x264 kaveri would be on pair with the i5-2500k whereas that in John the Ripper would be faster than the i5-3470, but slower than both i5 in the linux kernel compilation benchmark.
I have several doubts, among them:
i)
Those tests use GCC 4.7. I know that 4.8.1 provides some performance improvements for both Intel and AMD. Future version of the compilers would offer additional performance gains (and maybe some regression). However, would we wait additional performance gains from the new "bdver3" flag? Or would be safe to consider that AMD's claims about performance already include the effects from new compiler? I believe that AMD claims are focused to Windows systems, where software will be not recompiled and that we will see extra performance gain under linux with recompilation, but I don't know if this has been true in the past.
ii)
Kaveri will be the first fully enabled HSA APU. AMD claims that developers are finding 5x improvement in the performance with HSA enabled software. Will be HSA enabled in linux with recompilation using the "bdver3" flag or HSA has to be enabled in the source code (rewrite the application)?
iii)
Will be the Phoronix tests suite prepared for HSA?
According to different sources, AMD official claims, rumours... I finally believe that the CPU on the A10 desktop Kaveri APU will be about a 25% faster than trinity A10-5800k. I know that this is approximate and that some benchmarks will show more performance whereas others will show much less, but provides an idea of performance.
I am using linux benchmarks from the review of the A10-5800k and adding a 25% performance. For instance, in the x264 kaveri would be on pair with the i5-2500k whereas that in John the Ripper would be faster than the i5-3470, but slower than both i5 in the linux kernel compilation benchmark.
I have several doubts, among them:
i)
Those tests use GCC 4.7. I know that 4.8.1 provides some performance improvements for both Intel and AMD. Future version of the compilers would offer additional performance gains (and maybe some regression). However, would we wait additional performance gains from the new "bdver3" flag? Or would be safe to consider that AMD's claims about performance already include the effects from new compiler? I believe that AMD claims are focused to Windows systems, where software will be not recompiled and that we will see extra performance gain under linux with recompilation, but I don't know if this has been true in the past.
ii)
Kaveri will be the first fully enabled HSA APU. AMD claims that developers are finding 5x improvement in the performance with HSA enabled software. Will be HSA enabled in linux with recompilation using the "bdver3" flag or HSA has to be enabled in the source code (rewrite the application)?
iii)
Will be the Phoronix tests suite prepared for HSA?
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